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Buddha By Karen Armstrong

Penguin LIVES Series

Copyright Karen Armstrong 2001

CONTENTS

Introduction 

1. Renunciation 

2. Quest 

3. Enlightenment 

4. Dhamma 

5. Mission

6. Parinibbana

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 Glossary

Introduction 

Some Buddhists might say that to write a biography of Siddhatta Gotama is a very un-Buddhist

thing to do. In their view, no authority should be revered, however august; Buddhists must

motivate themselves and rely on their own efforts, not on a charismatic leader. One ninth-centurymaster, who founded the Lin-Chi line of Zen Buddhism, even went so far as to command his

disciples, “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!” to emphasize the importance of 

maintaining this independence from authority figures. Gotama might not have approved of theviolence of this sentiment, but throughout his life he fought against the cult of personality, and

endlessly deflected the attention of his disciples from himself. It was not his life and personality

but his teaching that was important. He believed that he had woken up to a truth that wasinscribed in the deepest structure of existence. It was a dhamma; the word has a wide range of 

connotations, but originally it denoted a fundamental law of life for gods, humans and animals

alike. By discovering this truth, he had become enlightened and had experienced a profound

inner transformation; he had won peace and immunity in the midst of life’s suffering. Gotamahad thus become a Buddha, an Enlightened or Awakened One. Any one of his disciples could

achieve the same enlightenment if he or she followed this method. But if people started to revere

Gotama the man, they would distract themselves from their task, and the cult could become aprop, causing an unworthy dependence that could only impede spiritual progress.

The Buddhist scriptures are faithful to this spirit and seem to tell us little about the details of Gotama’s life and personality. It is obviously difficult, therefore, to write a biography of the

Buddha that will meet modern criteria, because we have very little information that can be

considered historically sound. The first external evidence that a religion called Buddhism existedcomes from inscriptions made by King Asoka, who ruled the Mauryan state in North India from

about 269 to 232 B.C.E. But he lived some two hundred years after the Buddha. As a result of this

dearth of reliable fact, some Western scholars in the nineteenth century doubted that Gotama hadbeen a historical figure. They claimed that he had simply been a personification of the prevailing

Samkhya philosophy or a symbol of a solar cult. Yet modern scholarship has retreated from this

skeptical position, and argues that even though little in the Buddhist scriptures is what is

popularly known as “gospel truth,” we can be reasonably confident that Siddhatta Gotama didindeed exist and that his disciples preserved the memory of his life and teachings as well as they

could.

When trying to find out about the Buddha, we are dependent upon the voluminous Buddhistscriptures, which have been written in various Asian languages and take up several shelves in a

library. Not surprisingly, the story of the composition of this large body of texts is complex and

the status of its various parts much disputed. It is generally agreed that the most useful texts arethose written in Pali, a north Indian dialect of uncertain provenance, which seems to have been

close to Magadhan, the language that Gotama himself may have spoken. These scriptures were

preserved by Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand who belonged to the Theravadaschool. But writing was not common in India until the time of Asoka, and the Pali Canon was

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orally preserved and probably not written down until the first century B.C.E. How were thesescriptures composed?

It seems that the process of preserving the traditions about the Buddha’s life and teaching

began shortly after his death in 483 (according to the traditional Western dating). Buddhistmonks at this time led itinerant lives; they wandered around the cities and towns of the Ganges

plain and taught the people their message of enlightenment and freedom from suffering. Duringthe monsoon rains, however, they were forced off the road and congregated in their varioussettlements, and during these monsoon retreats, the monks discussed their doctrines and

practices. Shortly after the Buddha died, the Pali texts tell us that the monks held a council to

establish a means of assessing the various extant doctrines and practices. It seems that about fifty

years later, some of the monks in the eastern regions of North India could still remember theirgreat Teacher, and others started to collect their testimony in a more formal way. They could not

yet write this down, but the practice of yoga had given many of them phenomenally good

memories, so they developed ways of memorizing the discourses of the Buddha and the detailedrules of their Order. As the Buddha himself had probably done, they set some of his teachings in

verses and may even have sung them; they also developed a formulaic and repetitive style (still

present in the written texts) to help the monks learn these discourses by heart. They divided thesermons and regulations into distinct but overlapping bodies of material, and certain monks were

assigned the task of committing one of these anthologies to memory and passing it on to the next

generation.

About a hundred years after the Buddha’s death, a Second Council was held, and by this timeit seems that the texts had reached the form of the present Pali Canon. It is often called the

Tipitaka (“Three Baskets”) because later, when the scriptures were written down, they were kept

in three separate receptacles: the Basket of Discourses (Sutta Pitaka), the Basket of Disciplines(Vinaya Pitaka), and a miscellaneous body of teachings. Each of these three “Baskets” were

subdivided as follows:

[1] Sutta Pitaka, which consists of five “collections” (nikayas) of sermons, delivered by the

Buddha:[i] Digha Nikaya, an anthology of thirty-four of the longest discourses, which focus on the

spiritual training of the monks, on the duties of the laity, and on various aspects of the religious

life in India in the fifth century B.C.E. But there is also an account of the Buddha’s qualities(Sampasadaniya) and of the last days of his life ( Mahaparinibbdna).

[ii] Majjhima Nikaya, an anthology of 152 middle-length sermons (suttas). These include a

large number of stories about the Buddha, his struggle for enlightenment and his early preaching,

as well as some of the core doctrines.[iii] Samyutta Nikaya: a collection of five series of suttas, which are divided according to

subject, on such matters as the Eightfold Path and the makeup of the human personality.

[iv] Anauttara Nikaya, which has eleven divisions of suttas, most of which are included inother parts of the scriptures.

[v] Khuddaka-Nikaya, a collection of minor works, which include such popular texts as the

 Dhammapada, an anthology of the Buddha’s epigrams and short poems; the Udana, a collectionof some of the Buddha’s maxims, composed mostly in verse, with introductions telling how each

one came to be delivered; the Sutta-Nipata, another collection of verses, which include some

legends about the Buddha’s life; and the Jataka, stories about the former lives of the Buddha andhis companions, to illustrate how a person’s kamma (“actions”) have repercussions in their future

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me, sees the dhamma (the teaching), and he who sees the dhamma sees me.”There is a sense in which this is true of any major religious figure. Modern New Testament

scholarship has shown that we know far less about the historical Jesus than we thought we did.

“Gospel truth” is not as watertight as we assumed. But this has not prevented millions of peoplefrom modeling their lives on Jesus and seeing his path of compassion and suffering as leading to

a new kind of life. Jesus certainly existed, but his story has been presented in the Gospels as aparadigm. Christians have looked back to him when delving into the heart of their own problems.Indeed, it is only possible to comprehend Jesus fully if one has in some sense experienced

personal transformation. The same is true of the Buddha, who, until the twentieth century, was

probably one of the most influential figures of all time. His teaching flourished in India for 1,500

years, and then spread to Tibet, Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.For millions of human beings, he has been the person who has epitomized the human situation.

It follows that understanding the Buddha’s life, which is to an extent fused with his teaching,

can help us all to understand the human predicament. But this cannot be the sort of biographywhich is usually written in the twenty-first century; it cannot trace what actually happened or

discover controversial new facts about the Buddha’s life, since there is not a single incident in

the scriptures that we can honestly affirm to be historically true. What is historical is the fact of the legend, and we must take that legend whole, as it had developed at the time when the Pali

texts took their definitive shapes about a hundred years after the Buddha’s death. Today, many

readers will find aspects of this legend incredible: stories of gods and miracles are interspersed

with the more mundane and historically probable events in Gotama’s life. In modern historicalcriticism, it is usually a rule of thumb to discount miraculous events as later accretions. But if we

do this with the Pali Canon, we distort the legend. We cannot be certain that the more normal

incidents are any more original to the legend than these so-called signs and wonders. The monkswho evolved the Canon would certainly have believed in the existence of the gods, even though

they saw them as limited beings and, as we shall see, were beginning to regard them asprojections of human psychological states. They also believed that proficiency in yoga gave the

yogin extraordinary “miraculous” powers (iddhi). The yogic exercises trained the mind so that it

could perform exceptional feats, just as the developed physique of the Olympic athlete gives himpowers denied to ordinary mortals. People assumed that an expert yogin could levitate, read

people’s minds and visit other worlds. The monks who compiled the Canon would have expected

the Buddha to be able to do these things, even though he himself had a jaundiced view of iddhi

and felt that they should be avoided. As we shall see, the “miracle stories” are often cautionary

tales, designed to show the pointlessness of such spiritual exhibitionism.

Many of the stories recorded in the Pali scriptures have an allegorical or symbolic meaning.

The early Buddhists looked for significance, rather than historically accurate detail, in theirscriptures. We shall also find that the later biographies, like the one found in the Nidana Katha,

give alternative and more elaborate accounts of such incidents as Gotama’s decision to leave his

father’s house, or his enlightenment, than the more sparse and technical narratives in the PaliCanon. These later stories too are even more rich in mythological elements than the Canon: gods

appear, the earth shakes, gates open miraculously. Again, it would be a mistake to imagine that

these miraculous details were added to the original legend. These later consecutive biographieswere probably based on that lost account of the Buddha’s life which was composed about a

century after his death, at the same time that the Canon took its definitive form. It would not

have worried the early Buddhists that these overtly mythological tales were different from thosein the Canon. They were simply a different interpretation of these events, bringing out their

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spiritual and psychological meaning.But these myths and miracles show that even the Theravadin monks, who believed that the

Buddha should simply be regarded as a guide and an exemplar, were beginning to see him as a

superman. The more popular Mahayana school virtually deified Gotama. It used to be thoughtthat the Theravada represented a purer form of Buddhism and that the Mahayana was a

corruption, but, again, modern scholars see both as authentic. The Theravada continued to stressthe importance of yoga and honored those monks who became Arahants, “accomplished ones”who, like the Buddha, had achieved enlightenment. But the Mahayana, who revere the Buddha as

an eternal presence in the lives of the people and as an object of worship, have preserved other

values that are just as strongly emphasized in the Pali texts, particularly the importance of 

compassion. They felt that the Theravada was too exclusive and that the Arahants huggedenlightenment selfishly to themselves. They preferred to venerate the figures of the Bodhisattas,

the men or women destined to become Buddhas but who deferred enlightenment in order to

bring the message of deliverance to “the many.” This, we shall see, was similar to Gotama’s ownperception of the role of his monks. Both schools had seized upon important virtues; both, per-

haps, had also lost something.

Gotama did not want a personality cult, but paradigmatic individuals such as himself,Socrates, Confucius, and Jesus tend to be revered either as gods or as superhuman beings. Even

the Prophet Muhammad, who always insisted that he was an ordinary human being, is venerated

by Muslims as the Perfect Man, an archetype of the complete act of surrender ( islam) to God.

The immensity of the being and achievements of these people seemed to defy ordinarycategories. The Buddha legend in the Pali Canon showed that this was happening to Gotama, and

even though these miraculous stories cannot be literally true, they tell us something important

about the way human beings function. Like Jesus, Muhammad, and Socrates, the Buddha wasteaching men and women how to transcend the world and its suffering, how to reach beyond

human pettiness and expediency and discover an absolute value. All were trying to make humanbeings more conscious of themselves and awaken them to their full potential. The biography of a

person who has been canonized in this way cannot satisfy the standards of modern scientific

history, but in studying the archetypal figure presented in the Pali Canon and its related texts, welearn more about human aspiration and gain new insight into the nature of the human task. This

paradigmatic tale delineates a different kind of truth about the human condition in a flawed and

suffering world.But a biography of the Buddha has other challenges. The Gospels present Jesus, for example,

as a distinct personality with idiosyncrasies; special turns of phrase, moments of profound

emotion and struggle, irascibility and terror have been preserved. This is not true of the Buddha,

who is presented as a type rather than as an individual. In his discourses we find none of thesudden quips, thrusts and witticisms that delight us in the speech of Jesus or Socrates. He speaks

as the Indian philosophical tradition demands: solemnly, formally and impersonally. After his

enlightenment, we get no sense of his likes and dislikes, his hopes and fears, moments of desperation, elation or intense striving. What remains is an impression of a transhuman serenity,

self-control, a nobility that has gone beyond the superficiality of personal preference, and a

profound equanimity. The Buddha is often compared to non-human beings—to animals, trees orplants—not because he is subhuman or inhumane, but because he has utterly transcended the

selfishness that most of us regard as inseparable from our condition. The Buddha was trying to

find a new way of being human. In the West, we prize individualism and self-expression, but thiscan easily degenerate into mere self-promotion. What we find in Gotama is a complete and

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breathtaking self-abandonment. He would not have been surprised to learn that the scriptures donot present him as a fully-rounded “personality,” but would have said that our concept of 

personality was a dangerous delusion. He would have said that there was nothing unique about

his life. There had been other Buddhas before him, each of whom delivered the same dhamma

and had exactly the same experiences. Buddhist tradition claims that there have been twenty-five

such enlightened human beings and that after the present historical era, when knowledge of thisessential truth has faded, a new Buddha, called Metteyya, will come to earth and go through thesame life-cycle. So strong is this archetypal perception of the Buddha that perhaps the most

famous story about him in the Nidana Katha, his “Going Forth” from his father’s house, is said

in the Pali Canon to have happened to one of Gotama’s predecessors, Buddha Vipassi. The

scriptures were not interested in tracing Gotama’s unique, personal achievements but in settingforth the path that all Buddhas, all human beings must take when they seek enlightenment.

The story of Gotama has particular relevance for our own period. We too are living in a

period of transition and change, as was North India during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. Like the people of North India, we are finding that the traditional ways of experiencing the

sacred and discovering an ultimate meaning in our lives are either difficult or impossible. As a

result, a void has been an essential part of the modern experience. Like Gotama, we are living inan age of political violence and have had terrifying glimpses of man’s inhumanity to man. In our

society too there are widespread malaise, urban despair and anomie, and we are sometimes

fearful of the new world order that is emerging.

Many aspects of the Buddha’s quest will appeal to the modern ethos. His scrupulousempiricism is especially congenial to the pragmatic tenor of our own Western culture, together

with his demand for intellectual and personal independence. Those who find the idea of a

supernatural God alien will also warm to the Buddha’s refusal to affirm a Supreme Being. Heconfined his researches to his own human nature and always insisted that his experiences—even

the supreme Truth of Nibbana—were entirely natural to humanity. Those who have becomeweary of the intolerance of some forms of institutional religiosity will also welcome the Bud-

dha’s emphasis on compassion and loving-kindness.

But the Buddha is also a challenge, because he is more radical than most of us. There is acreeping new orthodoxy in modern society that is sometimes called “positive thinking.” At its

worst, this habit of optimism allows us to bury our heads in the sand, deny the ubiquity of pain in

ourselves and others, and to immure ourselves in a state of deliberate heartlessness to ensure ouremotional survival. The Buddha would have had little time for this. In his view, the spiritual life

cannot begin until people allow themselves to be invaded by the reality of suffering, realize how

fully it permeates our whole experience, and feel the pain of all other beings, even those whom

we do not find congenial. It is also true that most of us are not prepared for the degree of theBuddha’s self-abandonment. We know that egotism is a bad thing; we know that all the great

world traditions—not just Buddhism—urge us to transcend our selfishness. But when we seek 

liberation—in either a religious or secular guise—we really want to enhance our own sense of self. A good deal of what passes for religion is often designed to prop up and endorse the ego

that the founders of the faith told us to abandon. We assume that a person like the Buddha, who

has, apparently, and after a great struggle, vanquished all selfishness, will become inhuman,humorless and grim.

Yet that does not seem to have been true of the Buddha. He may have been impersonal, but

the state he achieved inspired an extraordinary emotion in all who met him. The constant, evenrelentless degree of gentleness, fairness, equanimity, impartiality and serenity acquired by the

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he recalled later, wept as they watched their cherished son put on the yellow robe that hadbecome the uniform of the ascetics and shave his head and beard. But we are also told that before

he left, Sidhatta stole upstairs, took one last look at his sleeping wife and son, and crept away

without saying goodbye. It is almost as though he did not trust himself to hold true to his resolveshould his wife beg him to stay. And this was the nub of the problem, since, like many of the

forest-monks, he was convinced that it was his attachment to things and people which bound himto an existence that seemed mired in pain and sorrow. Some of the monks used to compare thiskind of passion and craving for perishable things to a “dust” which weighed the soul down and

prevented it from soaring to the pinnacle of the universe. This may have been what Siddhatta

meant when he described his home as “dusty.” His father’s house was not dirty, but it was filled

with people who pulled at his heart and with objects that he treasured. If he wanted to live inholiness, he had to cut these fetters and break free. Right from the start, Siddhatta Gotama took it

for granted that family life was incompatible with the highest forms of spirituality. It was a per-

ception shared not only by the other ascetics of India, but also by Jesus, who would later tellpotential disciples that they must leave their wives and children and abandon their aged relatives

if they wanted to follow him.

Gotama would not, therefore, have agreed with our current cult of “family values.” Nor wouldsome of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries in other parts of the world, such as

Confucius (551-479) and Socrates (469-399), who were certainly not family-minded men, but

who would, like Gotama himself, become key figures in the spiritual and philosophical

development of humanity during this period. Why this rejectionism? The later Buddhistscriptures would evolve elaborate mythological accounts of Gotama’s renunciation of 

domesticity and his “Going Forth” into homelessness, and we shall consider these later in this

chapter. But the earlier texts of the Pali Canon give a starker version of the young man’s de-cision. When he looked at human life, Gotama could see only a grim cycle of suffering, which

began with the trauma of birth and proceeded inexorably to “aging, illness, death, sorrow andcorruption.” He himself was no exception to this universal rule. At present he was young, healthy

and handsome, but whenever he reflected on the suffering that lay ahead, all the joy and

confidence of youth drained out of him. His luxurious lifestyle seemed meaningless and trivial.He could not afford to feel “revolted” when he saw a decrepit old man or somebody who was

disfigured by a loathsome illness. The same fate—or something even worse—would befall him

and everybody he loved. His parents, his wife, his baby son and his friends were equally frail andvulnerable. When he clung to them and yearned tenderly toward them, he was investing emotion

in what could only bring him pain. His wife would lose her beauty, and little Rahula could die

tomorrow. To seek happiness in mortal, transitory things was not only irrational: the suffering in

store for his loved ones as well as for himself cast a dark shadow over the present and took awayall his joy in these relationships.

But why did Gotama see the world in such bleak terms? Mortality is a fact of life that is hard

to bear. Human beings are the only animals who have to live with the knowledge that they willdie one day, and they have always found this vision of extinction difficult to contemplate. But

most of us manage to find some solace in the happiness and affection that is also part of the

human experience. Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about thesorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the

tragedy of life can be devastating. From the very earliest times, men and women devised

religions to help them cultivate a sense that our existence has some ultimate meaning and value,despite the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. But sometimes the myths and practices of faith

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The modern monarchies and the cities, dominated by a market economy, had made thepeoples of the Gangetic region highly conscious of the rate of change. Urban dwellers could see

for themselves that their society was being rapidly transformed; they could measure its progress

and were experiencing a lifestyle that was very different from the repetitive rhythms of a ruralcommunity, which was based on the seasons and where everybody did the same things year after

year. In the towns, people were beginning to realize that their actions (kamma) had long-termconsequences, which they themselves might not experience but which they could see wouldaffect future generations. The doctrine of reincarnation, which was of quite recent origin, suited

this world much better than did the old Vedic faith. The theory of kamma stated that we had

nobody to blame for our fate but ourselves and that our actions would reverberate in the very

distant future. True, kamma could not release human beings from the wearisome round of samsara, but good kamma would yield a valuable return since it ensured a more enjoyable

existence next time. A few generations earlier, the doctrine of reincarnation had been a highly

controversial one, known only to an elite few. But by Gotama’s time, when people had becomeconscious of cause and effect in an entirely new way, everybody believed in it—even the

brahmins themselves.

But as in the other Axial countries, the people of northern India had begun to experiment withother religious ideas and practices which seemed to speak more directly to their altered

conditions. Shortly before Gotama’s birth, a circle of sages in the regions to the west of the

Gangetic plain staged a secret rebellion against the old Vedic faith. They began to create a series

of texts which were passed secretly from master to pupil. These new scriptures were called theUpanisads, a title which stressed the esoteric nature of this revolutionary lore, since it derived

from the Sanskrit apa-ni-sad (to sit near). The Upanisads ostensibly relied upon the old Vedas,

but reinterpreted them, giving them a more spiritual and interiorized significance; this markedthe beginning of the tradition now known as Hinduism, another of the great religions formed

during the Axial Age. The goal of the sages’ spiritual quest was the absolute reality of brahman,

the impersonal essence of the universe and the source of everything that exists. But brahman was

not simply a remote and transcendent reality; it was also an immanent presence which pervaded

everything that lived and breathed. In fact, by dint of the Upanisadic disciplines, a practitionerwould find that brahman was present in the core of his own being. Salvation lay not in animal

sacrifice, as the brahmins had taught, but in the spiritual realization that brahman, the absolute,

eternal reality that is higher even than the gods, was identical to one’s own deepest Self (atman).The idea of an eternal and absolute Self would greatly exercise Gotama, as we shall see. It

was a remarkable insight. To believe that one’s innermost Self was identical with brahman, the

supreme reality, was a startling act of faith in the sacred potential of humanity. The classic

expression of this doctrine is found in the early Chandogya Upanisad. The brahmin Uddalakawanted to show his son Svetaketu, who prided himself on his knowledge of the Vedas, the

limitations of the old religion. He asked Svetaketu to dissolve a lump of salt in a beaker of water.

The next morning, the salt had apparently vanished, but, of course, when Svetaketu sipped thewater he found that the salt permeated the whole beakerful of liquid, even though it could not be

seen. This was just like brahman, Uddalaka explained; you could not see It but nevertheless It

was there. “The whole universe has this first essence (brahman) as its Self (atman). That is whatthe Self is; that is what you are, Svetaketu!” This was rebellious indeed; once you understood

that the Absolute was in everything, including yourself, there was no need for a priestly elite.

People could find the ultimate for themselves, without cruel, pointless sacrifices, within theirown being.

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of an outsider. He had not been brought up to revere the brahmins and never felt at adisadvantage with them; later, when he founded his Order, he rejected any rigid categorization

on grounds of heredity. This critical stance would stand him in good stead in the cities, where the

caste system was disintegrating. It is also significant that Gotama’s first port of call was not aremote hermitage but a big industrial city. He would spend most of his working life in the towns

and cities of the Ganges, where there was widespread malaise and bewilderment resulting fromthe change and upheaval that urbanization brought with it, and where consequently there wasmuch spiritual hunger.

Gotama did not spend long in Rajagaha on this first visit, but set off in search of a teacher

who could guide him through his spiritual apprenticeship and teach him the rudiments of the

holy life. In Sakka, Gotama had probably seen very few monks, but as soon as he started totravel along the new trade routes that linked the cities of the region, he would have been struck 

by the large crowds of wandering bhikkhus in their yellow robes, carrying their begging bowls

and walking beside the merchants. In the towns, he would have watched them standing silentlyin the doorways of the houses, not asking for food directly but simply holding out their bowls,

which the householders, anxious to acquire merit that would earn them a good rebirth, were

usually glad to fill with leftovers. When Gotama left the road to sleep in the forests of banyan,ebony and palm trees that skirted the cultivated land, he would have come across bands of monks

living together in encampments. Some of them had brought their wives along and had set up a

household in the wild, while they pursued the holy life. There were even some brahmins who

had undertaken the “noble quest,” still tending the three sacred fires and seeking enlightenmentin a more strictly Vedic context. During the monsoon rains, which hit the region in mid-June and

lasted well into September, travel became impossible, and many of the monks used to live

together in the forests or in the suburban parks and cemeteries until the floods subsided and theroads became passable again. By the time Gotama came to join them, the wandering bhikkhus

were a notable feature of the landscape and a force to be reckoned with in society. Like themerchants, they had almost become a fifth caste.

In the early days, many had adopted this special ajiva vocation chiefly to escape from the

drudgery of domesticity and a regular job. There were always some renouncers who were chieflydropouts, debtors, bankrupts and fugitives from justice. But by the time Gotama embarked on his

quest, they were becoming more organized and even the most uncommitted monks had to

profess an ideology that justified their existence. Hence a number of different schools haddeveloped. In the efficient new kingdoms of Kosala and Magadha, the government had begun to

exercise more control over the inhabitants and would not allow people to embrace an alternative

lifestyle that made no contribution to society as a whole. The monks had to prove that they were

not parasites, but philosophers whose beliefs could improve the spiritual health of the country.Most of the new ideologies centered on the doctrine of reincarnation and kamma: their object

was to gain liberation from the ceaseless round of samsara that propelled them from one

existence to another. The Upanisads had taught that the chief cause of suffering was ignorance:once a seeker had acquired a deep knowledge of his true and absolute Self (atman), he would

find that he no longer experienced pain so acutely and have intimations of a final release. But the

monks of Magadha, Kosala and the republics to the east of the Gangetic plain were moreinterested in practicalities. Instead of regarding ignorance as the chief cause of dukkha, they saw

desire (tanha) as the chief culprit. By desire they did not mean those noble yearnings that

inspired human beings to such inspiring and elevating pursuits as the holy life, but the type of craving that makes us say “I want.” They were very worried by the greed and egotism of the new

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was what Alara Kalama had meant by “direct” knowledge, since the delusions and egotism of normal consciousness no longer came between the yogin and his dhamma; he “saw” it with new

clarity, without the distorting film of subjective associations. These experiences are not

delusions. The psychophysical changes wrought by pranayama and the disciplines that taughtthe yogin to manipulate his mental processes and even to monitor his unconscious impulses did

bring about a change of consciousness. The skilled yogin could now perform mental feats thatwere impossible for a layman; he had revealed the way the mind could work when trained in acertain manner. New capacities had come to light as a result of his expertise, just as a dancer or

an athlete displays the full abilities of the human body. Modern researchers have noted that

during meditation, a yogin’s heart rate slows down, his brain rhythms go into a different mode,

he becomes detached neurologically from his surroundings and acutely sensitive to the object of his contemplation.

Once he had entered his trance ( jhana) , the yogin progressed through a series of increasingly

deep mental states, which bear little relation to ordinary experience. In the first stage of  jhana, hewould become entirely oblivious to the immediate environment, and feel a sensation of great joy

and delight, which, a yogin could only assume, was the beginning of his final liberation. He still

had occasional ideas, and isolated thoughts would flicker across his mind, but he found that forthe duration of this trance he was beyond the reach of desire, pleasure or pain, and could gaze in

rapt concentration on the object, symbol or doctrine that he was contemplating. In the second and

third jhanas, the yogin had become so absorbed in these truths that he had entirely stopped

thinking and was no longer even conscious of the pure happiness he had enjoyed a short whilebefore. In the fourth and final jhana, he had become so fused with the symbols of his dhamma

that he felt he had become one with them, and was conscious of nothing else. There was nothing

supernatural about these states. The yogin knew that he had created them for himself, but, notsurprisingly, he did imagine that he was indeed leaving the world behind and drawing near to his

goal. If he was really skilled, he could go beyond the  jhanas, and enter a series of four ayatanas

(meditative states) that were so intense that the early yogins felt that they had entered the realms

inhabited by the gods. The yogin experienced progressively four mental states that seemed to

introduce him to new modes of being: a sense of infinity; a pure consciousness that is aware onlyof itself; and a perception of absence, which is, paradoxically, a plenitude. Only very gifted

yogins reached this third ayatana, which was called “Nothingness” because it bore no relation to

any form of existence in profane experience. It was not another being. There were no words orconcepts adequate to describe it. It was, therefore, more accurate to call it “Nothing” than

“Something.” Some have described it as similar to walking into a room and finding nothing

there: there was a sense of emptiness, space and freedom.

Monotheists have made similar remarks about their experience of God. Jewish, Christian andMuslim theologians have all, in different ways, called the most elevated emanations of the divine

in human consciousness “Nothing.” They have also said that it was better to say that God did not

exist, because God was not simply another phenomenon. When confronted with transcendence orholiness, language stumbles under impossible difficulties, and this kind of negative terminology

is one way that mystics instinctively adopt to emphasize its “otherness.” Understandably, those

yogins who had reached these ayatanas imagined that they had finally experienced theillimitable Self that resided in the core of their being. Alara Kalama was one of the few yogins of 

his day to have attained the plane of “Nothingness”; he claimed that he had “entered into” the

Self which was the goal of his quest. Gotama was an incredibly gifted student. Yoga usuallyrequired a long apprenticeship that could last a lifetime, but in quite a short time, Gotama was

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alone; he could never have entered the ecstatic state if his nurses had distracted him with theirchatter. Meditation required privacy and silence. But this seclusion went beyond physical

solitude. Sitting under the rose-apple tree, his mind had been separated from desire for material

things and from anything unwholesome and unprofitable. Since he had left home six yearsbefore, Gotama had been fighting his human nature and crushing its every impulse. He had come

to distrust any kind of pleasure. But, he now asked himself, why should he be afraid of the typeof joy he had experienced on that long-ago afternoon? That pure delight had had nothing to dowith greedy craving or sensual desire. Some joyful experiences could actually lead to an

abandonment of egotism and to the achievement of an exalted yogic state. Again, as soon as he

had posed the question to himself, Gotama responded with his usual, confident decisiveness: “I

am not afraid of such pleasures, “ he said. The secret was to reproduce the seclusion that had ledto his trance, and foster such wholesome (kusala) states of mind as the disinterested compassion

that had made him grieve for the insects and the shoots of young grass. At the same time, he

would carefully avoid any state of mind that would not be helpful or would impede hisenlightenment.

He had, of course, already been behaving along these lines by observing the “five

prohibitions” which had forbidden such “unhelpful” (akusala) activities as violence, lying,stealing, intoxication and sex. But now, he realized, this was not enough. He must cultivate the

positive attitudes that were the opposite of these five restraints. Later, he would say that a person

seeking enlightenment must be “energetic, resolute and persevering” in pursuing those “helpful,”

“wholesome” or “skillful” (kusala) states that would promote spiritual health. Ahimsa

(harmlessness) could only take one part of the way: instead of simply avoiding violence, an

aspirant must behave gently and kindly to everything and everybody; he must cultivate thoughts

of loving-kindness to counter any incipient feelings of ill will. It was very important not to telllies, but it was also crucial to engage in “right talk” and make sure that whatever you said was

worth saying: “reasoned, accurate, clear, and beneficial.” Besides refraining from stealing, abhikkhu should positively rejoice in taking whatever alms he was given, expressing no personal

preference, and should take delight in possessing the bare minimum. The yogins had always

maintained that avoiding the five prohibitions would lead to “infinite happiness,” but bydeliberately cultivating these positive states of mind, such exstasis could surely be redoubled.

Once this “skillful” behavior became so habitual that it was second nature, the aspirant, Gotama

believed, would “feel within himself a pure joy,” similar to if not identical with the bliss that hehad felt as a boy under the rose-apple tree.

This almost Proustian recollection was, according to the texts, a turning point for Gotama. He

resolved from then on to work with human nature and not fight against it—amplifying states of 

mind that were conducive to enlightenment and turning his back on anything that would stunt hispotential. Gotama was developing what he called a “Middle Way,” which shunned physical and

emotional self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme asceticism (which could be just as

destructive) on the other. He decided that he must immediately abandon the punitive regime thathe had followed with his five companions, which had made him so ill that there was no way he

could experience the “pure joy” that was a prelude to liberation. For the first time in months, he

took solid food, starting with what the texts call kummasa, a soothing milky junket or ricepudding. When the five bhikkhus saw him eating, they were horrified and walked away in

disgust, convinced that Gotama had abandoned the struggle for enlightenment.

But this, of course, was not the case. Gotama must have nursed himself slowly back to health,and during this time he probably started to develop his own special kind of yoga. He was no

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longer hoping to discover his eternal Self, since he was beginning to think that this Self was justanother one of the delusions that held people back from enlightenment. His yoga was designed to

help him become better acquainted with his human nature, so that he could make it work for him

in the attainment of Nibbana. First, as a preliminary to meditation, came the practice that hecalled “mindfulness” (sati) , in which he scrutinized his behavior at every moment of the day. He

noted the ebb and flow of his feelings and sensations, together with the fluctuations of hisconsciousness. If sensual desire arose, instead of simply crushing it, he took note of what hadgiven rise to it and how soon it faded away. He observed the way his senses and thoughts

interacted with the external world, and made himself conscious of his every bodily action. He

would become aware of the way he walked, bent down or stretched his limbs, and of his

behavior while “eating, drinking, chewing, and tasting, in defecating, walking, standing, sitting,sleeping, waking, speaking and keeping silent.” He noticed the way ideas coursed through his

mind and the constant stream of desires and irritations that could plague him in a brief half-hour.

He became “mindful” of the way he responded to a sudden noise or a change in the temperature,and saw how quickly even a tiny thing disturbed his peace of mind. This “mindfulness” was not

cultivated in a spirit of neurotic introspection. Gotama had not put his humanity under the

microscope in this way in order to castigate himself for his “sins.” Sin had no place in hissystem, since any guilt would simply be “unhelpful”: it would imbed an aspirant in the ego that

he was trying to transcend. Gotama’s use of the words kusala and akusala are significant. Sex,

for example, was not listed among the five yama because it was sinful, but because it would not

help a person reach Nibbana; sex was emblematic of the desire that imprisoned human beings insamsara; it expended energy that would be better employed in yoga. A bhikkhu refrained from

sex as an athlete might abstain from certain foods before an important competition. Sex had its

uses, but it was not “helpful” to one engaged in the “noble quest.” Gotama was not observing hishuman nature in order to pounce on his failings, but was becoming acquainted with the way it

worked in order to exploit its capacities. He had become convinced that the solution to theproblem of suffering lay within himself, in what he called “this fathom-long carcass, this body

and mind.” Deliverance would come from the refinement of his own mundane nature, and so he

must investigate it and get to know it as intimately as an equestrian learns to know the horse he istraining.

But the practice of mindfulness also made him more acutely aware than ever of the

pervasiveness of both suffering and the desire that gave rise to it. All these thoughts and longingsthat crowded into his consciousness were of such short duration. Everything was impermanent

(anicca). However intense a craving might be, it soon petered out and was replaced by

something quite different. Nothing lasted long, not even the bliss of meditation. The transitory

nature of life was one of the chief causes of suffering, and as he recorded his feelings, momentby moment, Gotama also became aware that the dukkha of life was not confined to the major

traumas of sickness, old age and death. It happened on a daily, even hourly basis, in all the little

disappointments, rejections, frustrations and failures that befall us in the course of a single day:“Pain, grief and despair are dukkha,” he would explain later, “being forced into proximity with

what we hate is suffering, being separated from what we love is suffering, not getting what we

want is suffering.” True, there was pleasure in life, but once Gotama had subjected this to themerciless scrutiny of mindfulness, he noticed how often our satisfaction meant suffering for

others. The prosperity of one person usually depends upon the poverty or exclusion of somebody

else; when we get something that makes us happy, we immediately start to worry about losing it;we pursue an object of desire, even when we know in our heart of hearts that it will make us

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“expansive, without limits, enhanced, without hatred or petty malevolence.” The consciousnessnow felt as infinite as the sound made by an expert conch-blower, which was thought to pervade

all space. If taken to a very high level, this yoga of compassion (karuna) yielded a “release of the

mind” (ceto-vimutti) , a phrase which, in the Pali texts, is used of enlightenment itself. Throughthe discipline of mindfulness too, Gotama began to experience a deepening calm, especially

when this was accompanied by pranayama. He was beginning to discover what it was like to livewithout the selfish cravings that poison our lives and our relations with others, imprisoning uswithin the petty confines of our own needs and desires. He was also becoming less affected by

these unruly yearnings. It has been found that this habit of attentive self-scrutiny has helped

Buddhist practitioners to monitor the distractions that deprive us of peace; as the meditator

becomes aware of the ephemeral nature of those invasive thoughts and cravings, it becomesdifficult to identify with them or to see them in any way as “mine.” Consequently they become

less disturbing.

We do not know how long it took Gotama to recover his health after his years of asceticism.The scriptures speed up the process to make it more dramatic, and give the impression that

Gotama was ready for the final struggle with himself after one bowl of junket. This cannot have

been true. The effects of mindfulness and the cultivation of skillful states take time. Gotamahimself said that it could take at least seven years, and stressed that the new self developed

imperceptibly over a long period. “Just as the ocean slopes gradually, falls away gradually, and

shelves gradually with no sudden incline,” he later warned his disciples, “so in this method,

training, discipline and practice take effect by slow degrees, with no sudden perception of theultimate truth.” The texts show Gotama attaining his supreme enlightenment and becoming a

Buddha in a single night, because they are less concerned with historical fact than with tracing

the general contours of the process of achieving release and inner peace.Thus in one of the oldest portions of the scriptures, we read that after Gotama had been

deserted by his five companions and had been nourished by his first meal, he set off towardUruvela, walking there by easy stages. When he reached Senanigama beside the Neranjara river,

he noticed “an agreeable plot of land, a pleasant grove, a sparkling river with delightful and

smooth banks, and, nearby, a village whose inhabitants would feed him.” This, Gotama thought,was just the place to undertake the final effort that would bring him enlightenment. If he was to

reproduce the calm content that had modulated so easily into the first  jhana under the rose-apple

tree, it was important to find a congenial spot for his meditation. He sat down, tradition has it,under a bodhi tree, and took up the asana position, vowing that he would not leave this spot until

he had attained Nibbana. This pleasant grove is now known as Bodh Gaya and is an important

site of pilgrimage, because it is thought to be the place where Gotama experienced the

 yathabhuta, his enlightenment or awakening. It was in this spot that he became a Buddha.It was late spring. Scholars have traditionally dated the enlightenment of Gotama at about the

year 528 B.C.E., though recently some have argued for a later date in the first half of the fifth

century. The Pali texts give us some information about what happened that night, but nothingthat makes much sense to an outsider who has not been through the Buddhist regimen. They say

that Gotama mused upon the deeply conditional nature of all life as we know it, saw all his past

lives, and recovered that “secluded” and solitary state he had experienced as a child. He thenslipped easily into the first jhana, and progressed through ever higher states of consciousness

until he gained an insight that forever transformed him and convinced him that he had freed

himself from the round of samsara and rebirth. But there seems little new about this insight,traditionally known as the Four Noble Truths and regarded as the fundamental teaching of 

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Buddhism. The first of these verities was the noble truth of suffering (dukkha) that informs thewhole of human life. The second truth was that the cause of this suffering was desire ( tanha). In

the third noble truth, Gotama asserted that Nibbana existed as a way out of this predicament and

finally, he claimed that he had discovered the path that leads from suffering and pain to itscessation in the state of Nibbana.

There seems nothing strikingly original about these truths. Most of the monks and ascetics of North India would have agreed with the first three, and Gotama himself had been convinced of them since the very beginning of his quest. If there is anything novel, it was the fourth truth, in

which Gotama proclaimed that he had found a way to enlightenment, a method which he called

the Noble Eightfold Path. Its eight components have been rationalized still further into a three-

fold plan of action, consisting of morality, meditation and wisdom:[1] Morality (silo) , which consists of right speech, right action and right livelihood. This

essentially comprises the cultivation of the “skillful” states in the way we have discussed.

[2] Meditation (samadhi) , which comprises Gotama’s revised yoga disciplines, under theheadings of right effort, mindfulness and concentration.

[3] Wisdom ( panna): the two virtues of right understanding and right resolve enable an

aspirant, by means of morality and meditation, to understand the Buddha’s Dhamma, enter into it“directly” and integrate it into his or her daily life in the way that we shall discuss in the

following chapter.

If there is any truth to the story that Gotama gained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in a single

night, it could be that he acquired a sudden, absolute certainty that he really had discovered amethod that would, if followed energetically, bring an earnest seeker to Nibbana. He had not

made this up; it was not a new creation or an invention of his own. On the contrary, he always

insisted that he had simply discovered “a path of great antiquity, an ancient trail, traveled byhuman beings in a far-off, distant era.” The other Buddhas, his predecessors, had taught this path

an immeasurably long time ago, but this ancient knowledge had faded over the years and hadbeen entirely forgotten. Gotama insisted that this insight was simply a statement of things “as

they really are”; the path was written into the very structure of existence. It was, therefore, the

Dhamma, par excellence, because it elucidated the fundamental principles that govern the life of the cosmos. If men, women, animals and gods kept to this path, they could all attain an

enlightenment that would bring them peace and fulfillment, because they were no longer

struggling against their deepest grain.But it must also be understood that the Four Noble Truths do not present a theory that can be

 judged by the rational intellect alone; they are not simply notional verities. The Buddha’s

Dhamma was essentially a method, and it stands or falls not by its metaphysical acuity or its

scientific accuracy, but by the extent to which it works. The truths claim to bring suffering to anend, not because people subscribe to a salvific creed and to certain beliefs, but because they

adopt Gotama’s program or way of life. Over the centuries, men and women have indeed found

that this regimen has brought them a measure of peace and insight. The Buddha’s claim, echoedby all the other great sages of the Axial Age, was that by reaching beyond themselves to a reality

that transcends their rational understanding, men and women become fully human. The Buddha

never claimed that his knowledge of the Four Noble Truths was unique, but that he was the firstperson, in this present era, to have “realized” them and made them a reality in his own life. He

found that he had extinguished the craving, hatred and ignorance that hold humanity in thrall. He

had attained Nibbana, and even though he was still subject to physical ailments and othervicissitudes, nothing could touch his inner peace or cause him serious mental pain. His method

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Undeterred, the Buddha continued his journey to Varanasi, an important city and a center of learning for the brahmins. The Buddha did not linger in the town, however, but went straight to

the Deer Park in the suburb of Isipatana, where he knew that his five former companions were

living. When these bhikkhus saw him approaching they were alarmed. As far as they knew,Gotama, their old mentor, had abandoned the holy life and reverted to luxury and self-

indulgence. They could no longer greet him as before, with the respect due to a great ascetic. Butthey were good men, dedicated to ahimsa, and did not want to hurt his feelings. Gotama, theydecided, could sit with them for a while, if he wished, and rest after his long walk. But when the

Buddha came closer, they were completely disarmed. Perhaps they too were struck by his new

serenity and confidence, because one of the bhikkhus ran forward to greet him, taking his robe

and his bowl, while the others prepared a seat, bringing water, a footstool and towel, so that theirold leader could wash his feet. They greeted him with affection, calling him “friend.” This would

often happen. The compassion and kindliness of the Buddha’s manner would frequently defuse

hostility in humans, gods and animals alike.The Buddha came straight to the point. They should not really call him friend any more, he

explained, because his old self had vanished and he had a wholly different status. He was now a

Tathagata, a curious title whose literal meaning is “Thus Gone.” His egotism had beenextinguished. They must not imagine that he had abandoned the holy life. Quite the reverse was

true. There was a compelling conviction and urgency in his speech that his companions had

never heard before. “Listen!” he said, “I have realized the undying state of Nibbana. I will

instruct you! I will teach you the Dhamma!” If they listened to his teachings and put them intopractice, they could become Arahants too; they could follow in his footsteps, entering into the

supreme truth and making it a reality in their own lives. All they had to do was to give him a fair

hearing.The Buddha then preached his first sermon. It has been preserved in the texts as the

 Dhammacakkappavattana-Sutta, The Discourse that Set Rolling the Wheel of the Dhamrna, be-cause it brought the Teaching into the world and set in motion a new era for humanity, who now

knew the correct way to live. Its purpose was not to impart abstruse metaphysical information,

but to lead the five bhikkhus to enlightenment. They could become Arahants, like himself, butthey would never equal their teacher, because the Buddha had achieved Nibbana by himself,

alone and unaided. He had then won further distinction, by making the decision to preach to the

human race, becoming a Samma SamBuddha, a Teacher of the Supreme Enlightenment. LaterBuddhist teaching would maintain that a Samma Sambuddha will only appear on earth every

32,000 years, when the knowledge of the Dhamma had completely faded from the earth. Gotama

had become the Buddha of our age, and began his career in the Deer Park of Isipatana.

But what was he going to teach? The Buddha had no time for doctrines or creeds; he had notheology to impart, no theory about the root cause of dukkha, no tales of an Original Sin, and no

definition of the Ultimate Reality. He saw no point in such speculations. Buddhism is

disconcerting to those who equate faith with belief in certain inspired religious opinions. Aperson’s theology was a matter of total indifference to the Buddha. To accept a doctrine on

somebody else’s authority was, in his eyes, an “unskillful” state, which could not lead to

enlightenment, because it was an abdication of personal responsibility. He saw no virtue insubmitting to an official creed. “Faith” meant trust that Nibbana existed and a determination to

prove it to oneself. The Buddha always insisted that his disciples test everything he taught them

against their own experience and take nothing on hearsay. A religious idea could all too easilybecome a mental idol, one more thing to cling to, when the purpose of the dhamma was to help

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reality was the main bar to liberation. The Buddha was able to combine these two causes. Hebelieved that each person is alive because he or she was preceded in a former existence by beings

who did not know the Four Truths and could not, therefore, extricate themselves from Craving

and Suffering. A person who was not correctly informed could make serious practical mistakes.A yogin might imagine, for example, that one of the higher states of trance was Nibbana and

would not make the extra effort to achieve complete release. In most versions of the Chain givenin the Pali texts, the second link is not kamma but the more difficult term sankhara (formation).But the two words both derive from the same verbal root: kr (to do). Sankhara has been

somewhat clumsily translated: “states or things being formed or prepared.” Thus our deeds

(kamma) are preparing the “consciousness” for a future existence; they are forming and

conditioning it. Since the Buddha saw our intentions as mental kamma, the Chain points out thatthose emotions which motivate our external actions will have future consequences; a lifetime of 

greedy, deluded choices will affect the quality of our last, dying thought (vinnana) and this will

affect the kind of life we have next time. Was this final, dying “consciousness” that passes into anew “name and form” an eternal, constant entity? Would the same person live again and again?

Yes and no. The Buddha did not believe that “consciousness” was the kind of permanent, eternal

Self sought by the yogins, but saw it as a last flickering energy, like a flame that leaps from onewick to another. A flame is never constant; a fire which is lit at nightfall both is and is not the

fire that is still burning at daybreak.

There are no fixed entities in the Chain. Each link depends upon another and leads directly to

something else. It is a perfect expression of the “becoming” which the Buddha saw as aninescapable fact of human life. We are always trying to become something different, striving for

a new mode of being, and indeed cannot remain in one state for long. Each sankhara gives place

to the next; each state is simply the prelude to another. Nothing in life can, therefore, be regardedas stable. A person should be regarded as a process, not an unchangeable entity. When a bhikkhu

meditated on the Chain and saw it yogically, becoming mindful of the way each thought andsensation rose and fell away, he acquired a “direct knowledge” of the Truth that nothing could be

relied upon, that everything was impermanent (anicca) , and would be inspired to redouble his

efforts to extricate himself from this endless Chain of cause and effect.This constant self-appraisal and attention to the fluctuations of everyday life induced a state

of calm control. When the daily practice of mindfulness was continued in his meditations, it

brought the bhikkhu an insight into the nature of personality that was more deeply rooted andimmediate than any that could be produced by rational deduction. It also led to greater self-

discipline. The Buddha had no time for the ecstatic trances of the brahmins. He insisted that his

monks should always conduct themselves with sobriety, and forbade emotional display. But

mindfulness also made the bhikkhu more aware of the morality of his behavior. He noticed howhis own “unskillful” actions could harm other people and that even his motivation could be

injurious. So, the Buddha concluded, our intentions were kamma and had consequences. The

intentions, conscious or unconscious, that inspired our actions were mental acts that were just asimportant as any external deeds. This redefinition of kamma as cetana (intention; choice) was

revolutionary; it deepened the entire question of morality, which was now located in the mind

and heart and could not merely be a matter of outward behavior.But mindfulness (sati) led the Buddha to a still more radical conclusion. Three days after the

five bhikkhus had become “stream-enterers,” the Buddha delivered a second sermon in the Deer

Park, in which he expounded his unique doctrine of anatta (no-self). He divided the humanpersonality into five “heaps” or “constituents” (khandhas): the body, feelings, perceptions,

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volitions (conscious and unconscious) and consciousness, and asked the bhikkhus to considereach khandha in turn. The body or our feelings, for example, constantly changed from one

moment to the next. They caused us pain, let us down and frustrated us. The same had to be said

of our perceptions and volitions. Thus each khandha, subject as it was to dukkha, flawed andtransitory, could not constitute or include the Self sought by so many of the ascetics and yogins.

Was it not true, the Buddha asked his disciples, that after examining each khandha, an honestperson found that he could not wholly identify with it, because it was so unsatisfactory? He wasbound to say, “This is not mine; this is not what I really am; this is not my self.” But the Buddha

did not simply deny the existence of the eternal, absolute Self. He now claimed that there was no

stable, lower-case self either. The terms “self” and “myself” were simply conventions. The

personality had no fixed or changeless core. As the Chain showed, every sentient being was in astate of constant flux; he or she was merely a succession of temporary, mutable states of 

existence.

The Buddha pressed this message home throughout his life. Where the seventeenth-centuryFrench philosopher Rene Descartes would declare “I think, therefore I am,” the Buddha came to

the opposite conclusion. The more he thought, in the mindful, yogic way he had developed, the

clearer it seemed that what we call the “self” is a delusion. In his view, the more closely weexamine ourselves, the harder it becomes to find anything that we can pinpoint as a fixed entity.

The human personality was not a static being to which things happened. Put under the

microscope of yogic analysis, each person was a process. The Buddha liked to use such

metaphors as a blazing fire or a rushing stream to describe the personality; it had some kind of identity, but was never the same from one moment to another. At each second, a fire was

different; it had consumed and recreated itself, just as people did. In a particularly vivid simile,

the Buddha compared the human mind to a monkey ranging through the forest: “it grabs onebranch, and then, letting that go, seizes another.” What we experience as the “self” is really just a

convenience-term, because we are constantly changing. In the same way, milk can become,successively, curds, butter, ghee, and fine extract of ghee. There is no point in calling any one of 

these transformations “milk,” even though there is a sense in which it is correct to do so.

The eighteenth-century Scottish empiricist David Hume came to a similar conclusion, butwith an important difference: he did not expect his insight to affect the moral conduct of his

readers. But in Axial Age India, knowledge had no significance unless it was found to be

transformative. A dhamma was an imperative to action, and the doctrine of anatta was not anabstract philosophical proposition but required Buddhists to behave as though the ego did not

exist. The ethical effects of this are far-reaching. Not only does the idea of “self” lead to

unskillful thoughts about “me and mine” and inspire our selfish cravings; egotism can arguably

be described as the source of all evil: an excessive attachment to the self can lead to envy orhatred of rivals, conceit, megalomania, pride, cruelty, and, when the self feels threatened, to

violence and the destruction of others. Western people often regard the Buddha’s doctrine of 

anatta as nihilistic and depressing, but at their best all the great world religions formed duringthe Axial Age seek to curb the voracious, frightened ego that does so much harm. The Buddha,

however, was more radical. His teaching of anatta did not seek to annihilate the self. He simply

denied that the self had ever existed. It was a mistake to think of it as a constant reality. Any suchmisconception was a symptom of that ignorance which kept us bound to the cycle of suffering.

 Anatta, like any Buddhist teaching, was not a philosophical doctrine but was primarily

pragmatic. Once a disciple had acquired, through yoga and mindfulness, a “direct” knowledge of 

anatta, he would be delivered from the pains and perils of egotism, which would become a

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to Damascus. Any such wrenching experience would have been regarded by the Buddha as “un-skillful.” People must be in tune with their natures, as he himself had been under the rose-apple

tree.

Just as Yasa had become a “stream-enterer,” the Buddha noticed an older merchant comingtoward them and realized that this must be Yasa’s father; he then had recourse to the iddhi or

spiritual powers that were thought to come with advanced proficiency in yoga, and made Yasadisappear. Yasa’s father was greatly distressed; the whole household was searching for Yasa, buthe had followed the print of the golden slippers which brought him directly to the Buddha.

Again, the Buddha made the merchant sit down, hinting that he would see Yasa very soon, and

instructed the father as he had the son. The merchant was immediately impressed: “Lord, that is

superb! Quite superb!” he cried. “The Dhamma has been made so clear that it is as though youare holding up a lamp in the darkness and putting right something that has gone profoundly

wrong.” He was then the first to make what has since become known as the Triple Refuge: an

assertion of complete confidence in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha of bhikkhus. Healso became one of the first lay followers, who continued to live as a householder but practiced a

modified form of the Buddhist method.

As Yasa, unseen by his father, listened to the Buddha, he attained full enlightenment andentered into Nibbana. At this point, the Buddha revealed him to his father, and the merchant

begged Yasa to return home, if only for his mother’s sake. The Buddha, however, gently

explained that Yasa had become an Arahant and would now find it impossible to live the life of a

householder. He was no longer afflicted by the cravings and desires that would enable him tofulfill a householder’s reproductive and economic duties; he would require hours of silence and

privacy for meditation that would not be possible in a family home. He could not return. Yasa’s

father understood, but begged the Buddha to dine at his house that lay, with Yasa as his attendantmonk. During the meal, the Buddha instructed Yasa’s mother and his former wife, and they

became the Buddha’s first women lay disciples.But the news spread beyond the household. Four of Yasa’s friends, who came from

Varanasi’s leading merchant families, were so impressed when they heard that he was now

wearing the yellow robe that they came to the Buddha for instruction. So did fifty of Yasa’sfriends from brahmin and ksatriya families in the surrounding countryside. All these young men

from the noble and aristocratic castes soon achieved enlightenment, so that in a very short space

of time, there were, the texts tell us, sixty-one Arahants in the world, including the Buddhahimself.

The Sangha was becoming a sizeable sect, but the new Arahants could not be allowed to

luxuriate in their newfound liberation. Their vocation was not a selfish retreat from the world;

they too had to return to the marketplace to help others find release from pain. They would nowlive for others, as the Dhamma enjoined. “Go now,” the Buddha told his sixty bhikkhus, 

and travel for the welfare and happiness of the people, out of compassion for the world, for the

benefit, welfare and happiness of gods and men. No two of you go the same way. Teach the

 Dhamma, bhikkhus , and meditate on the holy life. There are beings with only a little desire left 

within them who are languishing for lack of hearing the Dhamma; they will understand it.

Buddhism was not a doctrine for a privileged elite; it was a religion for “the people,” for “the

many (bahujana).” In practice, it appealed mostly to the upper classes and to intellectuals, but inprinciple it was open to anybody, and nobody, whatever his or her caste, was excluded. For the

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first time in history, somebody had envisaged a religious program that was not confined to asingle group, but was intended for the whole of humanity. This was no esoteric truth, like that

preached by the sages of the Upanisads. It was out in the open, in the towns, the new cities and

along the trade routes. Whenever they heard the Dhamma, people started to throng into theSangha, which became a force to be reckoned with in the Ganges plain. The members of the new

Order were known as “The Ordained Followers of the Teacher from Sakka,” but they calledthemselves simply the Union of  Bhikkus ( Bhikkhu-Sangha). People who joined found that theyhad “woken up” to whole regions of their humanity which had hitherto lain dormant; a new

social and religious reality had come into being.

Chapter 5 - Mission

BUDDHIST ART usually depicts the Buddha sitting alone, lost in solitary meditation, but in fact thegreater part of his life, once he had begun to preach the Dhamma, was spent surrounded by large,

noisy crowds of people. When he traveled, he was usually accompanied by hundreds of 

bhikkhus, who tended to chatter so loudly that occasionally the Buddha had to plead for a littlequiet. His lay disciples often followed the procession of monks along the roads, in chariots and

wagons loaded with provisions. The Buddha lived in towns and cities, not in remote forest

hermitages. But even though the last forty-five years of his life were passed in the public eye, the

texts treat this long and important phase rather perfunctorily, leaving the biographer little to work with. It is quite the opposite with Jesus. The Gospels tell us next to nothing about Jesus’s early

life and only seriously begin their story when he starts his preaching mission. The Buddhist

scriptures, however, record the Buddha’s sermons and describe the first five years of his teachingcareer in some detail, but after that the Buddha fades from view and the last twenty years of his

life are almost entirely unrecorded.The Buddha would have approved of this reticence. The last thing he wanted was a

personality cult, and he always insisted that it was the Dhamma and not himself that was

important. As we have noted, he used to say, “He who sees me sees the Dhamma, and he whosees the Dhamma sees me.” Furthermore, after his enlightenment nothing else could really

happen to him. He had no “self,” his egotism had been extinguished, and he was known as the

Tathagata, one who had, quite simply, “gone.” Even when the Pali texts do recount the earlyyears of his mission, they are less interested in historical fact and more interested in the symbolic

meaning of their stories. The Buddha had become an archetype of the spiritual life, an

embodiment of the Dhamma and of Nibbana. He was a new kind of human being: no longer

caught in the toils of greed and hatred, he had learned to manipulate his psyche in order to livewithout egotism. He was still living in the world, but inhabited another sacred dimension, too,

which monotheists would call the divine presence. In their account of these first teaching years,

the texts tell us nothing about the Buddha’s thoughts and feelings, therefore, but use his activitiesto show how the early Buddhists related to the urban, commercial, political and religious world

of north India.

The scriptures say that the Buddha attained Nibbana in late April or early May, but they donot reveal the year in which this important event took place. The conventional date has long been

held to be 528 B.C.E., though some modern scholarship would put it as late as 450. If we follow

the possibly accelerated chronology of the Pali texts, the Buddha might have sent the sixtymonks out to teach in September, after the end of the monsoon. Like the other sanghas, the

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legends indicate that the first recruits came from the brahmin and ksatriya castes, though themessage was preached to “the many,” and everybody was welcome to join. Merchants were also

attracted to the Order; like the monks, they were the “new men” of the developing society, and

needed a faith that reflected their essentially casteless status. But there are no detailed stories of individual conversions, such as the Gospel tales of fishermen dropping their nets and tax

collectors leaving their counting houses. Ananda and Devadatta stand out from the crowd of bhikkhus, but their portraits are still emblematic and stylized compared with the more vividcharacter studies of some of Jesus’s disciples. Even Sariputta and Mogallana, the leading

disciples of the Buddha, are presented as colorless figures with apparently little personality.

There are no touching vignettes about the Buddha’s relationship with his son: Rahula appears in

the Pali legends simply as another monk. The Buddha instructs him in meditation, as he wouldany other bhikkhu, and there is nothing in the narrative to suggest that they are father and son.

We are left with images, not with personalities, and with our Western love of individuality, we

can feel dissatisfied.But this is to misunderstand the nature of the Buddhist experience. Many of these early

monks achieved enlightenment precisely by contemplating the doctrine of anatta. This enabled

them to transcend self; indeed, the Buddha denied that there was any such thing as a constantpersonality. He would have regarded the obstinate belief in a sacred, irreducible nub of selfhood

as an “unskillful” delusion that would get in the way of enlightenment. As a result of the

spirituality of anatta, the Buddha himself is presented in the Pali Canon as a type rather than an

individual. He contends with other types: with Skeptics, brahmins and Jains. He owed hisliberation precisely to the extinction of the unique traits and idiosyncrasies that Western people

prize in their heroes. The same goes for his disciples. There is little to distinguish the Buddha

from his bhikkhus, who are all depicted as minor Buddhas. Like him, they have becomeimpersonal and have vanished as individuals. The Canonical texts preserve this anonymity by

declining to delve into the secrets of their hearts. Nor will they reveal the lovable quirks in theircharacters before the achievement of enlightenment. It may be no accident that it is Devadatta

and Ananda who stand out from the rank and file. Devadatta is filled with egotism, and the

gentle Ananda has failed to achieve enlightenment and consequently has more observablepersonal traits than, say, a spiritual giant like Sariputta. We see farther into Ananda’s heart

during the last days of the Buddha’s life, but, as we shall see, he cannot share the Buddha’s

perspective. To a Westerner, who would decry this loss of personality, the bhikkhus wouldprobably reply that the surrender of the ego was a price worth paying for the inner peace of 

Nibbana, which is probably impossible for anybody who is still immured in selfhood.

But the impersonality of the Buddha and his disciples did not mean that they were cold and

unfeeling. They were not only gentle and compassionate, but deeply sociable, and their attemptto reach out to “the many” attracted people who found this lack of egotism compelling.

Like all his monks, the Buddha was constantly on the road, preaching to as wide an audience

as possible, but during the three months of the monsoon, when travel was difficult, he took tostaying in the Bamboo Grove outside Rajagaha. Even though the park now belonged to the

Sangha, the bhikkhus had not built in it, but still lived in the open. A rich merchant, however,

visited the Grove, liked what he saw, and offered to build sixty huts for the monks, and theBuddha gave his permission. The merchant then invited the Buddha and his monks to a meal. It

was no small matter to feed such a large gathering, and on the morning of the dinner, the

household was in an uproar as the servants prepared a delicious meal of broth, rice, sauces, andsweets. The merchant was so busy hurrying about and giving orders that he scarcely had time to

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 —without limit; a boundless goodwill toward the whole world,

unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity! 

A lay person who achieved this attitude would have advanced a long way along the spiritualpath.

The scriptures do give us a few examples of lay disciples who practiced meditation outsidethe Sangha and reached Nibbana, but these solitary virtuosi were the exception rather than therule. It was thought that an Arahant could not continue to live the life of a householder: after

achieving enlightenment, he would either join the Sangha immediately or he would die. This,

apparently, is what happened to Suddhodana, the Buddha’s father, who attained Nibbana in the

fifth year of his son’s teaching mission and died the next day. When the Buddha heard the news,he returned to Kapilavatthu and stayed for a while in Nigrodha Park. This event led to a new de-

velopment in the Sangha, which, it seems, the Buddha did not initially welcome.

While he was living in the Nigrodha arama, the Buddha was visited by his father’s widow,Pajapati Gotami: she was also the Buddha’s aunt, and had become his foster-mother after the

death of his own mother. Since she was now free, she told her nephew, she wanted to be

ordained in the Sangha. The Buddha adamantly refused. There was no question of admittingwomen to the Order. He would not change his mind, even though Pajapati begged him three

times to reconsider and she left his presence very sadly. A few days later, the Buddha set out for

Vesali, the capital of the republic of Videha on the northern bank of the Ganges. He often stayed

in the arama there, which had a hall with a high-gabled roof. One morning, Ananda washorrified to find Pajapati sobbing on the porch with a crowd of other Sakyan women. She had cut

off her hair, put on the yellow robe and had walked all the way from Kapilavatthu. Her feet were

swollen, and she was filthy and exhausted. “Gotami,” cried Ananda; “What are you doing here insuch a state? And why are you crying?” “Because the Blessed One will not have women in the

Sangha,” Pajapati replied. Ananda was concerned. “Wait here,” he said, “I will ask the Tathagataabout this.”

But the Buddha still refused to consider the matter. This was a serious moment. If he

continued to bar women from the Sangha, it meant that he considered that half of the human racewas ineligible for enlightenment. But the Dhamma was supposed to be for everybody: for gods,

animals, robbers, men of all castes—were women alone to be excluded? Was rebirth as a man

the best they could hope for? Ananda tried another tack. “Lord,” he asked, “are women capableof becoming ‘stream-enterers’ and, eventually, Arahants?” “They are, Ananda,” the Buddha

replied. “Then surely it would be a good thing to ordain Pajapati,” Ananda pleaded, and

reminded his master of her kindness to him after his mother had died. The Buddha reluctantly

conceded defeat. Pajapati could enter the Sangha if she accepted eight strict rules. Theseprovisions made it clear that the nuns (bhikkhunls) were an inferior breed. A nun must always

stand when in the presence of a male bhikkhu, even one who was young or newly ordained; nuns

must always spend the vassa retreat in an arama with male monks, not by themselves; they mustreceive instruction from a bhikkhu once every fortnight; they could not hold their own

ceremonies; a nun who had committed a grave offense must do penance before the monks as

well as the bhikkhunls; a nun must request ordination from both the male and the female Sangha;she must never rebuke a bhikkhu, though any monk could rebuke her; nor could she preach to

bhikkhus. Pajapati gladly accepted these regulations and was duly ordained, but the Buddha was

still uneasy. If women had not been admitted, he told Ananda, the Dhamma would have beenpracticed for a thousand years; now it would last a mere five hundred years. A tribe with too

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many women would become vulnerable and be destroyed; similarly, no Sangha with womenmembers could last long. They would fall upon the Order like mildew on a field of rice.

What are we to make of this misogyny? The Buddha had always preached to women as well

as to men. Once he had given permission, thousands of women became bhikkhunls, and theBuddha praised their spiritual attainments, said that they could become the equals of the monks,

and prophesied that he would not die until he had enough wise monks and nuns, lay men and laywomen followers. There seems to be a discrepancy in the texts, and this has led some scholars toconclude that the story of his grudging acceptance of women and the eight regulations was added

later and reflects a chauvinism in the Order. By the first century B.C.E., some of the monks

certainly blamed women for their own sexual desires, which were impeding them from

enlightenment, and regarded women as universal obstacles to spiritual advance. Other scholarsargue that the Buddha, enlightened as he was, could not escape the social conditioning of the

time, and that he could not imagine a society that was not patriarchal. They point out that, despite

the Buddha’s initial reluctance, the ordination of women was a radical act that, perhaps for thefirst time, gave women an alternative to domesticity.

While this is true, there is a difficulty for women that should not be glossed over. In the

Buddha’s mind, women may well have been inseparable from the “lust” that made enlightenmentan impossibility. It did not occur to him to take his wife with him, as some of the renouncers did,

when he left home to begin his quest. He simply assumed that she could not be the partner in his

liberation. But this was not because he found sexuality disgusting, like the Christian Fathers of 

the Church, but because he was attached to his wife. The scriptures contain a passage which,scholars agree, is almost certainly a monkish interpolation. “Lord, how are we to treat women?”

Ananda asked the Buddha in the last days of his life. “Do not look at them, Ananda.” “If we do

not see them, how should we treat them?” “Do not speak to them, Ananda.” “And if we have tospeak to them?” “Mindfulness must be observed, Ananda.” The Buddha may not have personally

subscribed to this full-blown misogyny, but it is possible that these words reflect a residualunease that he could not overcome.

If the Buddha did harbor negative feelings about women, this was typical of the Axial Age.

Sad to say, civilization has not been kind to women. Archeological discoveries indicate thatwomen were sometimes highly esteemed in pre-urban societies, but the rise of the military states

and the specialization of the early cities led to a decline in their position. They became the

property of men, were excluded from most professions, and were subjected to the sometimesdraconian control of their husbands in some of the ancient law codes. Elite women managed to

hold on to some shreds of power, but in the Axial countries women suffered a further loss of 

status at about the time that the Buddha was preaching in India. In Iran, Iraq, and, later, in the

Hellenistic states, women were veiled and confined in harems, and misogynistic ideas flourished.The women of classical Athens (500-323) were particularly disadvantaged and almost entirely

secluded from society; their chief virtues were said to be silence and submission. The early

Hebrew traditions had exalted the exploits of such women as Miriam, Deborah and Jael, but afterthe prophetic reform of the faith, women were relegated to second-class status in Jewish law. It is

notable that in a country such as Egypt, which did not participate initially in the Axial Age, there

was a more liberal attitude to women. It seems that the new spirituality contained an inherenthostility toward the female that has lasted until our own day. The Buddha’s quest was masculine

in its heroism: the determined casting off of all restraints, the rejection of the domestic world and

women, the solitary struggle, and the penetration of new realms are attitudes that have becomeemblematic of male virtue. It is only in the modern world that this attitude has been challenged.

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off the Buddha’s feet with his trunk, sprinkled it over his own forehead, and retreated backward,gazing yearningly at the Buddha all the while until he was out of sight. Then he ambled

peaceably back to the stables, a reformed beast from that day forth.

Seeing that the Buddha seemed proof against these assaults, the conspirators changed theirtactics. Ajatasattu, who had succeeded in his own bid for power, dropped Devadatta and became

one of the Buddha’s lay disciples. Devadatta was now on his own and tried to find support withinthe Sangha. He appealed to some of the younger and more inexperienced monks of Vesall,arguing that the Buddha’s Middle Way was an unacceptable deviation from tradition. Buddhists

should return to the tougher ideals of the more traditional ascetics. Devadatta proposed five new

rules: all members of the Sangha should live in the forests rather than in the aramas during the

monsoon; they must rely solely on alms and must not accept invitations to eat at the houses of the laity; instead of new robes, they must wear only cast-off rags picked up from the streets; they

must sleep in the open instead of in huts; and they must never eat the flesh of any living being.

These five rules may represent the historical kernel in the story of Devadatta’s defection. Someof the more conservative bhikkhus may well have been concerned that standards were slipping

and could have attempted to break away from the main Sangha. Devadatta might have been

associated with this reform movement, and his enemies, the proponents of the Buddha’s MiddleWay, could have blackened Devadatta’s name by inventing the dramatic legends that we find in

the Vinaya.

When Devadatta published his five rules and asked the Buddha to make them obligatory for

the whole Sangha, the Buddha refused, pointing out that any monk who wished to live in thisway was perfectly free to do so, but that coercion in these matters was against the spirit of the

Order. Monks must make up their own minds and not be forced to follow anybody else’s

directives. Devadatta was jubilant. The Buddha had refused his pious request! He announcedtriumphantly to his followers that the Buddha was given over to luxury and self-indulgence and

that it was their duty to withdraw from their corrupt brethren. With five hundred young monks,Devadatta decamped to Gayasisa Hill outside Rajagaha, while the Buddha dispatched Sariputta

and Moggallana to win the rebellious bhikkhus back. When Devadatta saw them approaching, he

immediately assumed that they had deserted the Buddha and come to join him. Elated, he calledan assembly and addressed his disciples far into the night. Then, pleading that his back was

paining him, he retired to bed, handing the floor to Sariputta and Moggallana. Once these two

loyal elders began to speak, they were soon able to persuade the bhikkhus to return to theBuddha, who received them back without reprisals. Some texts tell us that Devadatta committed

suicide; others that he died before he was able to be reconciled with the Buddha. Whatever the

truth of these stories, they make a telling point about the suffering of old age; they also form a

cautionary tale. Even the Sangha was not immune to the selfishness, ambition and dissension thatwas so rampant in public life.

The Buddha reflected on this danger in the last year of his life. He was now eighty years old.

King Ajatasattu was by this time firmly established on the throne of Magadha and frequentlyvisited the Buddha. He was planning an offensive against the republics of Malla, Videha,

Licchavi, Koliya and Vajji, all to the east of his kingdom, who had formed a defensive

confederacy known collectively as “the Vajjians.” The king was determined to wipe them off themap and absorb them into his kingdom, but before he launched his attack, he sent his minister

Vassakara, a brahmin, to tell the Buddha what he was about to do and to listen carefully to his

comments. The Buddha was cryptic. He told Vassakara that as long as the Vajjians remained trueto the republican traditions; held “frequent and well-attended meetings”; lived together in

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concord; respected the older men, listening carefully to their advice; and observed the laws andpieties of their ancestors, King Ajatasattu would not be able to defeat them. Vassakara listened

attentively and told the Buddha that, since the Vajjians at present met all these conditions, they

were in fact impregnable. He went back to break the news to the king. Buddhist tradition,however, has it that shortly after this, King Ajatasattu did manage to defeat the Vajjians: he

achieved this feat by sending spies into the republics to sow discord among the leaders. So therewas a poignancy and urgency in the Buddha’s next words, after the door had closed behindVassakara. He applied the same conditions to the Sangha: as long as its members respected the

senior bhikkhus, held frequent assemblies, and remained absolutely true to the Dhamma, the

Sangha would survive.

The tribal republics were doomed. They belonged to the past and would shortly be sweptaway by the new militant monarchies. King Pasenedi’s son would soon defeat and massacre the

Sakyans, the Buddha’s own people. But the Buddha’s Sangha was a new, up-to-date, and

spiritually skillful version of the old republican governments. It would hold true to values thatthe more violent and coercive monarchies were in danger of forgetting. But this was a dangerous

world. The Sangha could not survive the internal dissension, disrespect for elders, lack of loving-

kindness, and superficiality that had surfaced during the Devadatta scandal.  Bhikkhus andbhikkhunis must be mindful, spiritually alert, energetic and faithful to the meditative disciplines

that alone could bring them enlightenment. The Order would not decline as long as monks

avoided such unskillful pursuits as “gossiping, lazing around, and socializing; as long as they

have no unprincipled friends and avoid falling under such people’s spell; as long as they do notstop halfway in their quest and remain satisfied with a mediocre level of spirituality.” If they

failed in this, the Sangha would become indistinguishable from any secular institution; it would

fall prey to the vices of the monarchies and become hopelessly corrupt.After the meeting with Vassakara, the Buddha decided to leave Rajagaha and travel north in

order to spend the vassa retreat in Vesall. It is as though the revelation of King Ajatasattu’s plansto “exterminate and destroy” the Vajjians had momentarily repelled him and made him aware of 

the affinity he felt for the beleaguered republics. He had spent most of his working life in Kosala

and Maghada and had fulfilled an important mission there. But now, an old man who had himself suffered from the aggression that fueled the political life of these kingdoms, he headed out into

the more marginal regions of the Ganges basin.

Slowly, with a large entourage of monks, the Buddha journeyed through Magadhan territory,first to Nalanda and then to Pataligama (the modern Patna), later the capital of the great Buddhist

king Asoka(c. 269-232 B.C.E.), who would create a monarchy that eschewed violence and tried to

embody the compassionate ethic of the Dhamma. The Buddha noticed the great fortresses that

were being built by the Magadhan ministers in preparation for the coming war with the Vajjians,and prophesied the city’s future greatness. There a delegation of lay disciples put a rest house at

the Buddha’s disposal, laying down carpets and hanging a great oil lamp, and the Buddha sat up

all night preaching the version of the Dhamma that had been adapted to the needs of the laity. Hepointed out that the prudence of skillful behavior could benefit a virtuous man or woman even in

this world, and would ensure that in their next lives they would be farther along the route to

enlightenment.Finally, the Buddha arrived at Vesall. At first everything seemed as it had always been. He

lodged in a mango grove belonging to Ambapali, one of the town’s leading courtesans. She came

out to greet the Buddha with a fleet of state carriages, sat at his feet to listen to the Dhamma, andinvited him to dine. Just as he had given his consent, the members of the Licchavi tribe who were

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living in Vesall sallied forth in a body to invite the Buddha themselves, riding in a splendidprocession of brilliantly colored carriages. It was a marvelous sight, and the Buddha smiled when

he saw it, telling his bhikkhus that now they had some idea of the magnificence of the gods in

heaven. The Licchavis sat around the Buddha, who “spurred them on, inspired and encouraged”them with talk of the Dhamma. At the end of this discourse, the Licchavis issued their invitation

to dinner, and when the Buddha told them that he was already engaged to eat with Ambapali,they did I not lose their good humor, but snapped their fingers, crying I “Oh the mango girl hasbeaten us, the mango girl has outwitted us!” That night, at dinner, the courtesan donated the

mango grove to the Sangha, and the Buddha stayed for a while there, preaching to his bhikkhus.

There was the usual bustle, glamour and excitement around the Buddha and, at its heart, the

constant exhortation to an intense interior life of mindfulness and meditation.But then the picture began to darken. The Buddha left Vesali with his monks and took up

residence in the nearby village of Beluvagamaka. After they had stayed there a while, he

suddenly dismissed his monks: they should go back to Vesali and put up for the monsoon retreatwherever they could. He and Ananda would stay on in Beluvagamaka. A new solitude had

entered the Buddha’s life, and from this point he seemed to shun the larger cities and towns and

to seek out ever more obscure locations. It was as though he were already beginning to leave theworld. After the bhikkhus had left, the Buddha became seriously ill, but with great self-control he

suppressed the pain and overcame his sickness. It was not right for him to die yet and attain the

Ultimate Nibbana ( parinibbana) , which would complete the enlightenment he had won under the

bodhi tree. First he must bid the Sangha farewell. The Buddha, therefore, recovered, left hissickroom, and came out to sit with Ananda on the porch of the hut in which he was staying. His

illness had shaken Ananda to the core. “I am used to seeing the Blessed One healthy and fit,” he

told the Buddha tremulously as he sat down beside him. For the first time he had realized that hismaster could die. “I felt my body go rigid,” he said, “I could not see straight, my mind was

confused.” But he had found comfort in one thought: the Buddha would not die until he hadmade some practical arrangements about the succession and the government of the Sangha,

which would have to change once the master had departed. The Buddha sighed. “What does the

Sangha expect of me, Ananda?” he asked patiently. The bhikkhus all knew everything he had toteach them. There was no secret doctrine for a few chosen leaders. Such thoughts as “I must

govern the Sangha” or “The Sangha depends on me” did not occur to an enlightened man. “I am

an old man, Ananda, eighty years old,” the Buddha went on inexorably. “My body can only getabout with the help of makeshifts, like an old cart.” The one activity that brought him ease and

refreshment was meditation, which introduced him to the peace and release of Nibbana. And so

it must be for every single bhikkhu and bhikkhuil. “Each of you must make himself his island,

make himself and no one else his refuge.” No Buddhist could depend upon another person andneed one of their number to lead the Order. “The Dhamma—and the Dhamma alone—was his

refuge.” How could the bhikkhus become self-reliant? They knew the answer already: by

meditation, concentration, mindfulness and a disciplined detachment from the world. The Sanghaneeded no one to govern it, no central authority. The whole point of the Buddhist lifestyle was to

achieve an inner resource that made such dependence quite ludicrous.

But Ananda had not yet achieved Nibbana. He was not a skilled yogin and had not managedto achieve this degree of self-sufficiency. He was personally attached to his master and would

become the model of those Buddhists who were not ready for such yogic heroism, but needed a

more human devotion (bhakhti) to the Buddha to encourage them. Ananda had another shock afew days later, when a novice brought them news of the deaths of Sariputta and Moggallana in

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Nalanda. Yet again, the Buddha was mildly exasperated to see Ananda’s distress. What did heexpect? Was it not the essence of the Dhamma that nothing lasted forever and that there was al-

ways separation from everything and everybody that we love? Did Ananda imagine that

Sariputta had taken with him the laws and insights by which Buddhists lived, or that the code of virtue and the knowledge of meditation had also departed from the Sangha? “No, Lord,”

protested the hapless Ananda. It was just that he could not help remembering how generousSariputta had been to them all, how he had enriched and aided them by his tireless exposition of the Dhamma. It had been heartbreaking to see his begging bowl and robe, which the novice had

brought to the Buddha when he came to break the news. “Ananda,” said the Buddha again, “each

of you should make himself his island, make himself and no one else his refuge; each of you

must make the Dhamma his island, the Dhamma and nothing else his refuge.”Far from being distressed about the deaths of his two closest disciples, the Buddha was

overjoyed that they had attained their parinibbana, their ultimate release from the frailties of 

mortality. It was a joy to him to have had two such disciples, who were so beloved by the wholeSangha! How could he be sorrowful and lament, when they had reached the final goal of their

quest? Nevertheless, for the unenlightened, there is a poignancy and sadness in the Buddha’s

end. None of the inner circle was left except for Ananda. The texts try to disguise it, but therewere no more excited crowds and colorful dinners with friends. Instead, the Buddha and Ananda,

two old men, struggled on alone, experiencing the weariness of survival and the passing away of 

companions which constitutes the true tragedy of old age. That even the Buddha may have had

some intimations of this and felt potentially bereft is suggested by the last appearance of Mara,his shadow-self, in his life. He and Ananda had just spent the day alone together at one of the

many shrines in Vesali, and the Buddha remarked that it was possible for a fully enlightened man

like himself to live out the rest of this period of history, if he wished. He was, the texts tell us,giving Ananda a broad hint. If he begged him to stay in the world, out of compassion for the

gods and men who needed his guidance, the Buddha had the power to live on. But, yet again,poor Ananda was simply not up to the occasion, did not understand, and, therefore, did not ask 

the Buddha to remain with the Sangha until the end of this historical era. It was an omission for

which some members of the early Sangha blamed Ananda—a poor reward for the years of de-voted service to his master, which the Buddha himself certainly appreciated. But when the

Buddha had dropped his hint, Ananda did not see its significance, made a polite and

noncommittal rejoinder, and went off to sit at the foot of a nearby tree.For a while, perhaps, even the Buddha may have had a fleeting wish for a companion who

could understand more fully what was in his mind, as he felt his life ebbing away, because just at

this point, Mara, his shadow-self, appeared. “Let the Tathagata achieve his parinibbana now,”

Mara whispered seductively. Why go on? He deserved his final rest; there was no point in furtherstruggle. For the last time, the Buddha repelled Mara. He would not enter the bliss of his Final

Nibbana until his mission was complete and he was certain that the Order and the holy life were

properly established. But, he added, that would be very soon: “In three months time,” he toldMara, “the Tathagata will attain his parinibbana.” It was then, the scriptures tell us, at the Capala

Shrine in Vesali, that the Buddha consciously and deliberately “abandoned the will to live.” It

was a decision that reverberated throughout the cosmos. The world of men was shaken by anearthquake, which made even Ananda realize that something momentous was afoot, and in the

heavens a solemn drum began to beat. It was too late, the Buddha told the now contrite Ananda,

for his attendant to beg him to live on. He must now speak to the Sangha and bid his monks aformal farewell. In the great painted hall of the Vesali arama, he spoke to all the bhikkhus who

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when he reached Kusinara—achieve his Final Nibbana. A little later, he told Ananda that nobodyshould blame Cunda for his death: it was an act of great merit to give a Buddha his last almsfood

before he attained his parinibbana. 

What was this parinibbana? Was it simply an extinction? And if so, why was thisNothingness regarded as such a glorious achievement? How would this “final” Nibbana differ

from the peace that the Buddha had attained under the bodhi tree? The word nibbana, it will berecalled, means “cooling off” or “going out,” like a flame. The term for the attainment of Nib-bana in this life in the texts is saupadi-sesa. An Arahant had extinguished the fires of craving,

hatred and ignorance, but he still had a “residue” (sesa) of “fuel” (upadi) as long as he lived in

the body, used his senses and mind, and experienced emotions. There was a potential for a

further conflagration. But when an Arahant died, these khandha could never be ignited again,and could not feed the flame of a new existence. The Arahant was, therefore, free from samsara

and could be absorbed wholly into the peace and immunity of Nibbana.

But what did that mean? We have seen that the Buddha always refused to define Nibbana,because we have no terms that are adequate for this experience that transcends the reach of the

senses and the mind. Like those monotheists who preferred to speak of God in negative terms,

the Buddha sometimes preferred to explain what Nibbana was not. It was, he told his disciples, astate

where there is neither earth nor water, light nor air; neither infinity or space; it is not infinity of 

reason but nor is it an absolute void ... it is neither this world or another world; it is both sun

and moon. 

That did not mean that it was really “nothing”; we have seen that it became a Buddhist heresy toclaim that an Arahant ceased to exist in Nibbana. But it was an existence beyond the self, and

blissful because there was no selfishness. Those of us who are unenlightened, and whosehorizons are still constricted by egotism, cannot imagine this state. But those who had achieved

the death of the ego knew that selflessness was not a void. When the Buddha tried to give his

disciples a hint of what this peaceful Eden in the heart of the psyche was like, he mixed negativewith positive terms. Nibbana was, he said, “the extinction of greed, hatred and delusion”; it was

the Third Noble Truth; it was “Taintless,” “Unweakening,” “Undisintegrating,” “Inviolable,”

“Non-distress,” “Non-affliction,” and “Unhostility.” All these epithets emphasized that Nibbanacanceled out everything that we find intolerable in life. It was not a state of annihilation: it was

“Deathless.” But there were positive things that could be said of Nibbana too: it was “the Truth,”

“the Subtle,” “the Other Shore,” “the Everlasting,” “Peace,” “the Superior Goal,” “Safety,”

“Purity, Freedom, Independence, the Island, the Shelter, the Harbor, the Refuge, the Beyond.” Itwas the supreme good of humans and gods alike, an incomprehensible Peace, and an utterly safe

refuge. Many of these images are reminiscent of words that monotheists have used to describe

God.Indeed, Nibbana was very much like the Buddha himself. Later Buddhists of the Mahayana

school would claim that he was so wholly infused by Nibbana that he was identical with it. Just

as Christians see what God might be like when they contemplate the man Jesus, these Buddhistscould see the Buddha as the human expression of this state. Even in his own life, people had

intimations of this. The brahmin who could not classify the Buddha, since he no longer fit into

any mundane or celestial category, had sensed that, like Nibbana, the Buddha was “SomethingElse.” The Buddha had told him that he was “one who had woken up,” a man who had shed the

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dreary, painful limitations of profane humanity and achieved something Beyond. King Pasenedihad also seen the Buddha as a refuge, a place of safety and purity. When he had left home, he

had experimented with his human nature until he discovered this new region of peace within. But

he was not unique. Anybody who applied himself or herself seriously to the holy life could findthis Edenic serenity within. The Buddha had lived for forty-five years as a human without

egotism; he had, therefore, been able to live with pain. But now that he was approaching the endof his life, he was about to shed the last indignities of age; the khandha, the “bundles of firewood” that had blazed with greed and delusion in his youth, had long been extinguished, and

could now be thrown away. He was about to reach the Other Shore. So he walked feebly but with

great confidence toward the obscure little town where he would attain the parinibbana. 

The Buddha and Ananda, two old men, crossed the Hirarinavati river with their crowd of bhikkhus, and turned into a grove of sal trees on the road that led into Kusinara. By now the

Buddha was in pain. He lay down and the sal trees immediately burst into flower and dropped

their petals upon him, even though it was not the season for blossom. The place was filled withgods, the Buddha said, who had come to witness his last triumph. But what gave a Buddha far

more honor was the fidelity of his followers to the Dhamma he had brought them.

As he lay dying, the Buddha gave directions about his funeral. His ashes were to be treatedlike those of a cakkavatti; his body should be wrapped in a cloth and cremated with perfumed

woods, and the remains buried at the crossroads of a great city. From first to last, the Buddha had

been paired with the cakkavatti, and after his enlightenment had offered the world an alternative

to a power based on aggression and coercion. His funeral arrangements drew attention to thisironic counterpoint. The great kings of the region, who had appeared to be so potent when the

young Gotama had arrived in Magadha and Kosala, had both been snuffed out. The violence and

cruelty of their deaths showed that the monarchies were fueled by selfishness, greed, ambition,envy, hatred and destruction. They had brought prosperity and cultural advancement; they

represented the march of progress and benefited many people. But there was another way of lifethat did not have to impose itself so violently, that was not dedicated to self-aggrandizement, and

that made men and women happier and more humane.

The funeral arrangements were just too much for Ananda. His plight during these last daysreminds us of the immense gulf that separates the unenlightened from the Arahant. Ananda knew

all about Buddhism intellectually, but this knowledge was no substitute for the “direct

knowledge” of the yogin. It could be of no help to him when he started to experience the pain of the loss of his master. This was infinitely worse than the death of Sariputta. He understood the

Noble Truth of Suffering with his mundane, rational mind, but he had not absorbed it so that it

fused with his whole being. He still could not accept the fact that everything was transient and

would pass away. Because he was not a proficient yogin, he could not “penetrate” thesedoctrines and make them a living reality. Instead of feeling a yogic certainty, he felt only raw

pain. After he had listened to the Buddha’s uninipassioned directions about his ashes, Ananda

left his master’s bedside and fled to one of the other huts in the grove. For a long time, he stoodweeping, resting his head against the lintel. He felt a complete failure: “I am still only a

beginner,” wept the elderly bhikkhu. “I have not reached the goal of the holy life; my quest is

unfulfilled.” He lived in a community of spiritual giants who had reached Nibbana. Who wouldhelp him now? Who would even bother with him? “My Teacher is about to attain his

 parinibbana—my compassionate Teacher who was always kind to me.”

When the Buddha heard about Ananda’s tears, he sent for him. “That is enough, Ananda,” hesaid. “Don’t be sorrowful; don’t grieve.” Had he not explained, over and over again, that nothing

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was permanent but that separation was the law of life? “And Ananda,” the Buddha concluded,“for years you have waited on me with constant love and kindness. You have taken care of my

physical needs, and have supported me in all your words and thoughts. You have done all this to

help me, joyfully and with your whole heart. You have earned merit, Ananda. Keep trying, andyou will soon be enlightened too.”

But Ananda was still struggling. “Lord,” he cried, “do not go to your Final Rest in this drearylittle town, with mud walls; this heathen, jungle outpost, this backwater.” The Buddha had spentthe greater part of his working life in such great cities as Rajagaha, Kosambi, Savatti, and

Varanasl. Why could he not return to one of these cities, and finish his quest surrounded by all

his noble disciples, instead of dying here alone, among these ignorant unbelievers? The texts

show that the early Sangha was embarrassed by the obscurity of Kusinara and the fact that theirTeacher died far away in the jungle. The Buddha tried to cheer Ananda, pointing out that

Kusinara had once been a thriving city and the great capital of a cakkavatti. But the Buddha’s

choice of Kusinara almost certainly had a deeper reason. No Buddhist could ever rest on pastachievements; the Sangha must always press forward to bring help to the wider world. And a

Buddha would not see a dismal little town like Kusinara in the same way as would an

unenlightened man. For years he had trained his conscious and his unconscious mind to seereality from an entirely different perspective, free from the distorting aura of egotism that clouds

the judgment of most human beings. He did not need the external prestige upon which many of 

us rely in order to prop up our sense of self. As a Tathagata, his egotism had “gone.” A Buddha

had no time to think of himself, even on his deathbed. Right up to the last, he continued to livefor others, inviting the Mallians of Kusinara to come to the grove in order to share his triumph.

He also took the time to instruct a passing mendicant, who belonged to another sect but was

drawn to the Buddha’s teaching, even though Ananda protested that the Buddha was ill andexhausted.

Finally, he turned back to Ananda, able with his usual sympathy to enter into his thoughts.“You may be thinking, Ananda: ‘The word of the Teacher is now a thing of the past; now we

have no more Teacher.’ But that is not how you should see it. Let the Dhamma and the

Discipline that I have taught you be your Teacher when I am gone.” He had always told hisfollowers to look not at him but at the Dhamma; he himself had never been important. Then he

turned to the crowd of bhikkhus who had accompanied him on this last journey, and reminded

them yet again that ‘All individual things pass away. Seek your liberation with diligence.”Having given his last advice to his followers, the Buddha fell into a coma. Some of the monks

felt able to trace his journey through the higher states of consciousness that he had explored so

often in meditation. But he had gone beyond any state known to human beings whose minds are

still dominated by sense experience. While the gods rejoiced, the earth shook and those bhikkhus

who had not yet achieved enlightenment wept, the Buddha experienced an extinction that was,

paradoxically, the supreme state of being and the final goal of humanity:

 As a flame blown out by the wind 

Goes to rest and cannot be defined,

So the enlightened man freed from selfishness

Goes to rest and cannot be defined.

Gone beyond all images—

Gone beyond the power of words. 

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GLOSSARY 

Ahimsa: “Harmlessness”; the ethic adopted by many of the ascetics of North India to counter the

aggression of the new states.

Akusala: “Unskillful” or “unhelpful” states, which will impede the quest for Enlightenment.

Anatta: “No-Soul”; the doctrine that denies the existence of a constant, stable and discrete

personality.

Arahant: An ‘Accomplished One,’ who has attained Nibbana.

Arama: Pleasure-park donated to the Buddhist Order for a settlement.

Asana: The correct position for yogic meditation, with straight back and crossed legs.

Avasa: Rural settlements, often built from scratch each year by the Buddhist monks, for the

monsoon retreats.

Atman: The eternal, unchangeable Self sought by the yogins, ascetics and followers of the

Samkhya philosophy. It was believed in the Upanisads to be identical with brahman. 

Ayatana: Meditative planes achieved by a very advanced yogin.

Bhikkhu: An “almsman,” a mendicant monk who begs for his daily food; the feminine form is

bhikkhuni: nun.

Bodhisatta: A man or woman who is destined to achieve enlightenment. Sanskrit: boddhisatva. 

Brahman: The fundamental, supreme and absolute principle of the cosmos in Vedic andUpanisadic religion.

Brahmin: A member of the priestly caste in Aryan society, responsible for sacrifice and the

transmission of the Vedas.

Brahmacariya: The holy life of chastity, the quest for enlightenment and liberation from pain.

Buddha: An Enlightened or Awakened person.

Cakkavatti: The World Ruler or Universal King of Indian folklore, who would govern thewhole world and impose justice and righteousness by force.

Ceto-vimutti: The “release of the mind”; a synonym for enlightenment and the achievement of Nibbana.

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Dhamma: Originally, the natural condition of things, their essence, the fundamental law of their

existence; then: religious truth, the doctrines and practices that make up a particular religious

system. Sanskrit: dharma. 

Dharana: A yogic term: “concentration.” A process of internal visualization, during which theyogin becomes conscious of his own consciousness.

Dukkha: ‘Awry, flawed, unsatisfactory”; often simply translated as “suffering.”

Ekagrata: In yoga, the concentration of the mind “on a single point.”

Gotami: The name of any woman belonging to the Gotama tribe.

Iddhi: The dominion of spirit over matter; the “miraculous” powers thought to come with

proficiency in yoga, e.g., levitation or the ability to change shape at will.

Jhana: A yogic trance; a current of unified thought that deepens in four distinct stages. Sanskrit:

dhyana. 

Jina: A conqueror, an honorary title of Buddha, used by Jains.

Kamma: Actions; deeds. Sanskrit: Karman.

Khandha: “Heaps, bundles, lumps”; the constituents of the human personality in the Buddha’s

theory of anatta. The five “heaps” are body, feelings, perception, volition and consciousness.

Ksatriya: The caste of warriors, noblemen and aristocrats responsible in Aryan society for

government and defense.

Kusala: The “skillful” or “helpful” states of mind and heart that Buddhists should cultivate in

order to achieve enlightenment.

Nibbana: “Extinction; blowing out”: the extinction of self which brings enlightenment and

liberation from pain (dukkha). Sanskrit: Nirvana. 

Nikaya: “Collections” of discourses in the Pali Canon.

Niyamas: The bodily and psychological disciplines which are a prerequisite for yogicmeditation.

Pabbajja: “Going Forth”; the act of renouncing the world in order to live the holy life of amonk. Later, the first step in Buddhist ordination.

Pali: The North Indian dialect used in the most important collection of Buddhist scriptures.

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Parinibbana: The “Final Nibbana”; the final rest of an enlightened person achieved at death,since he or she will not be reborn into another existence.

Patimokkha: “Bond”; a ceremony whereby the early monks came together every six years torecite the Buddhist Dhamma; later, after the Buddha’s death, this became a recitation of the

monastic rule of the Order and a confession of transgressions, which was held once a fortnight.

Praktri: Nature; the natural world in the philosophy of Samkhya.

Pranayama: The breathing exercises of yoga, which induce a state of trance and well-being.

Pratyahara: In yoga, a “withdrawal of the senses,” the ability to contemplate an object with the

intellect alone.

Purusa: The Absolute Spirit that pervades all beings in the philosophy of Samkhya.

Sakyamuni: “The Sage of the Republic of Sakka,” a title given to the Buddha.

Samadhi: Yogic concentration; meditation; one of the components of the Eightfold Path to

enlightenment.

Samkhya: “Discrimination”: a philosophy, akin to yoga, which was first preached by the sage

Kapila in the second century B.C.E.

Samma SamBuddha: A Teacher of Enlightenment, one of whom comes to humanity every

32,000 years; Siddhatta Gotama is the Samma SamBuddha of our own age.

Samsara: “Keeping going”; the cycle of death and rebirth, which propels people from one life to

the next; the transience and restlessness of mundane existence.

Sangha: Originally a tribal assembly, an ancient governing body in the old republics of North

India; later a sect professing the dhamma of a particular teacher; finally, the Buddhist Order of Bhikkhus.

Sankhara: “Formation”; the formative element in kamma, which determines and shapes one’s

next existence.

Sutta: A religious discourse. Sanskrit: Sutra. 

Tanha: The “craving” or “desire” which is the most powerful cause of suffering.

Tapas: Asceticism; self-mortification.

Tathagata: “Thus Gone,” the title given to the Buddha after enlightenment, sometimes

translated as “the Perfect One.”

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